Reprographic devices, such as photocopiers, electronic printers, digital copiers, and the like, represent a challenge to the authors and publishers of copyrighted works. Copyrighted material can be reproduced quickly, cheaply, and easily by reprographic devices without first obtaining permission to make the copies or compensating the copyright owner. Some copying services attempt to comply with copyright laws by obtaining permission to copy prior to reproducing copyrighted material. One common method of obtaining permission to copy copyrighted material is to call the publisher of the copyrighted work and request the desired permission. Permission may not be granted for hours or even days, which is unacceptable when time is an issue. Alternatively, some copying services seek a copyright license from a Reproductive Rights Organization (RRO), such as the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC). RROs license organizations other than copying services: schools, governments, and large private enterprises. RROs typically provide blanket licenses under which the licensee pays royalties to RRO for a period of years. During that term the licensee's copier usage is periodically surveyed by sampling. The RRO uses these surveys to determine the percentage of copyrighted materials copied as compared to the total number of copies made. That percentage is used to fix a per copy fee for the duration of the license. RROs also typically require licensees to track information regarding the bibliographic source and/or content of copyrighted material, and the type of work for sampled works so that individual authors and publishers can be compensated. This sampling process is cumbersome because much of it is manually implemented. Additionally, the sampling process does not accurately compensate authors and publishers. Automatic tracking of the number of copies made by a particular device reduces some of the disadvantages of a sampling system but copier users still need to manually identify the particular work being copied.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,179,212 to Lahr, assigned to Xerox Corporation, discloses a transaction accounting system for the automated royalty accounting of copyright-coded paper documents. The complete automated transaction accounting system includes a document copier and a copier access control system including a transaction data terminal for input of transaction information such as the date of the transaction, coded copyright information such as information contained in the ISSN/ISBN number, user identification and number of copies to be produced. A decoder is provided, the output of the decoder being connected to the transaction data terminal to input the document data. In accordance with this accounting system, a document being copied must be initially coded, at the time the paper is manufactured or printed, by application of special electrically conductive coatings to one or more areas of its surface, in order for the system to recognize the document as copyrighted. Further, the copier itself has to be provided with a suitable decoder in order to identify the copyright-coded document. Information about the bibliographic source of the document (such as the ISBN/ISSN number) is either coded into the document, or must be input by the user, either by scanning a special bar code imprinted on the document or by keyboard entry. The system cannot be used with any document which does not have the special conductive coating, so is not applicable to the great majority of published and copyrighted documents. The, system would be difficult to use with a plurality of different reprographic devices, since it requires a special document platen to sense the paper conductivity; this would make it difficult to economically install such a device for brief consecutive sample periods on many existing reprographic devices. Further, the system is manual in nature when a bar code is not applied to the document. Finally, identifying the author of a particular copied portion of a publication, such as a magazine article, is difficult, as is the categorization of the content of the portion (such as prose versus poetry versus music, or the proportion of photographic material), because most bar code schemes only identify an entire publication.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,728,984 to Daniele, assigned to Xerox Corporation, discloses a data handling and archiving system. The system first transfers a document image into digital signals and then stores the image in memory for later retrieval. An electronic printer having an image input scanner is used for scanning the documents. The printer is equipped with a recognition circuit that reads a bar or other code on the document to distinguish encoded documents from other non-coded documents. The system does not track the copying of certain documents but rather reads the special coded digital images previously placed on the input document, decodes said images and either prints a message based on their content or uses their content as auxiliary software to control the printer operation.
Copyrighted material in electronic form offers numerous possibilities for encoding, encryption, and adding marking subsequent to publication to protect copyrighted material from unauthorized copying. Unfortunately, methods of protecting electronic versions of copyrighted material do not address the copying of hardcopy copyrighted material subsequent to publication.
Despite efforts to protect copyrighted works the International Copyright Information Center estimates annual loss of $15 Billion in revenue caused by unauthorized copying of copyrighted material.